Premera Blue Cross announced a new value-based contract with U.S. Anesthesia Partners (USAP) on July 10th, 2018. The contract is one of the first of its kind between the plan and a specialty group like USAP and is one of the first value-based contracts for USAP.

The contract will provide incentives for improvements in care in the following areas:

Patient satisfaction

Perioperative temperature management -There is a correlation between body temperature and post-surgical infections.

Post-anesthetic transfer of care – Implementing a proper protocol addressing direct transfer of care from procedure room to other units, such as the intensive care unit (ICU), aims to reduce the risks associated to patient transfers.

The agreement demonstrates Premera’s movement away from traditional fee-for-service payments based on volume to a model that rewards quality and improvement in patient services. Under the contract, patient satisfaction will be measured by feedback from a third-party survey with questions focused on patient experience with other quality measures coming from care data and analysis.

In a statement about the announcement, Dr. David Lavitt, Chair Clinical Governance Board, U.S. Anesthesia Partners-Washington praised the partnership.

“We are excited to collaborate with Premera to create a Quality-based Incentive Program (QIP) based on key, nationally recognized anesthesia metrics. USAP’s robust, data capture technology allows us to compare our performance against these important metrics. This provides us with real-time measurement of our performance and enables continuous improvement to ensure excellence in patient care and in the quality of anesthesia service we are privileged to deliver for our facility partners.”